email from my father...

email from my father…

When you were a child, I went over to the Z’s to pick you up and heard someone playing the piano. When Janet answered the door, she told me that it was you and wasn’t it marvelous. You weren’t playing any song, just improvising and it sounded good. Until Janet came to the door, I thought it was her and when I saw her coming (and the music hadn’t stopped), I thought it must be Mark.

…untapped skills? (Probably not.)

But he then linked to this article about an NYU psych professor with a focus on developmental cognitive neuroscience, who taught himself to play guitar because, well, he wanted to:

Compared to his Guitar Hero controller his Yamaha felt heavy and awkward. The musical scale isn’t perfectly linear. (Quick: what’s another name for C flat?) And the guitar has the same notes at different frets along different strings. “That’s something the brain doesn’t want to deal with,” he said. “There’s no one-to-one relationship on where the notes are. You have all these memory traces that interfere with one another.”

I definitely recommend checking out the whole article, it’s a very interesting (if brief) look into how the human brain works with music.